Pay the House

You owe The House. The next payment is three packs away. Prohibition-era America. The front room is a loan house — brass, velvet, and a ledger with your name in it. The back room is the card table where you stopped being a customer and became a debt. Your only trade is cigarette cards. Rip the packs, complete the sets, turn paper into cash — faster than the interest turns your name into a problem.Every pack is a bet you are forced to make. Seven kinds of pack, and the shelf is redrawn every layer. The Standard Pack floors the last card at Uncommon. High Roller deals three cards, no floor, four times the Epic and Legendary rate. Special Order triples the odds on one set you name. Whale, Pure, Double-Floor, Back Alley — you never get all of them at once, so the shelf you are dealt is the strategy you get.Sets pay. The vault does not care. Eighteen sets across five rarities — Champagne, Chips, Onyx, Blood Pact, Pharaoh's Gold — six of them drawn fresh each run, with sizes and jackpots rolled per game. Completing a set pays more than selling ever will. But the vault starts at six slots, and the card you have to keep is always the card you could have sold.Collection Night doubles the bill. A payment falls due every two days, and every third one is Collection Night — twice the amount, visible from the moment the layer begins. You can see the wall coming from ten packs away. That is the point.Three ways out. All of them cost more than they give. Pawn a card for 80% of its value and buy it back before the Loan House keeps it for good. Take 300 from the shark at 25% a day. Defer a payment and owe one and a half times as much. Every escape hatch is a loan against a version of you who will have less time than you do.Four layers. The House raises the number every time you clear one. 1,400. Then 3,000, 4,800, 7,000. The moment a layer is paid off, the House comes to count your vault: unfinished sets are liquidated at a loss, anything still in pawn is gone. You carry the cash and the trinkets into the next layer — and a fresh set of names to collect.Thirty trinkets, five slots. Between layers you walk the Gilded Row. Three trinkets on offer, and never enough cash for all of them. Chain makes the next pack free after every completed set. Undertaker refunds half of whatever the Loan House seizes. Card Sharp halves the day's interest whenever you open three packs. Buy power now, or keep the cash and survive the interest later.Features - 30–45 minute runs — four escalating debt layers, three difficulty tiers to unlock - 7 pack types, 18 sets, 30 trinkets; the shelf, the sets and their jackpots are rolled every run - Pawn, loan shark and deferral — a full risk toolkit that always charges more than it pays - Hand-composed Art Deco noir artwork in black and gold, every card and trinket illustrated - Fully localized in 31 languages